Colonialism and the Politics of Gender and Literature in the Netherlands Indies: The Story of the Nyai

A focus on the nyai in colonial discourse makes it possible to understand the history of gender and sexuality as integral to colonial ideology and practice, and it enables a more complex view of power relations in the colony. The term nyai is hard to translate because it is quite specific to the Netherlands Indies. The European habit of having a nyai duplicated a practice already existing among high-class Native men in the Indies, who, before marrying a woman of suitable rank, were permitted to maintain “practice wives,” often poor girls from the countryside who were bought at a young age from their parents. The nyai plays a crucial role in colonial and postcolonial literature, especially in and for the emergence of literature as a genre in the Netherlands Indies and Indonesia.